2. Manage multiple WordPress sites automagically with InfiniteWP.

I’m using InfiniteWP for those tasks, except for backups (see below). It takes a few clicks and infiniteWP will automatically login to all your WordPress installations and perform the maintenance tasks.

I recommend this only for you if you manage multiple WordPress sites. If you have only 1 or 2, manual maintenance will be just fine.

ManageWP is also an excellent tool and better known, but InfiniteWP does the same things at a significantly lower price. I save $ 480 each year since I switched from ManageWP to InfiniteWP.

3. Use BackupBuddy for WordPress backups

Automatic backups require certain features to be available on the web server. Less professional backup solutions often work only with a few perfect web servers. Backup buddy has never failed me, no matter how weird the client’s web server was configured.

You can schedule automatic updates, store them locally or send to remote locations (important!). You have tons of options, for example you can exclude directories. Or you can automatically remove old backups.

It also comes with an easy to use program to restore a site from your backup within a few minutes.

Bonus: Use BackupBuddy for installing new sites in minutes.

This is handy for people who frequently create new sites, for example for web agencies.

I’ve created a backup of a fully configured WordPress site, including premium plugins and settings. Using the restore tool I can quickly install this complete WordPress to a new domain.

For each new site this saves me between 90 minutes and 2 hours of work.

4. For other backups use GoodSync, especially for your local computer.

6. Use an autoresponder for email marketing. I use arpReach.

You can automatically or manually build a list of email addresses and manually send emails to the complete list or a selection of that list.

You can automate the sending of emails. For example you can subscribe a lead to your autoresponder and then automatically send previously saved marketing emails every 7 days.

You could even use it to schedule individual emails to individual clients. But that is something that’s probably not used much, although I see some use cases for it.

I use arpReach, and have been using the arpReach’s predecessor AutoResponse Plus for about 8 years. I’ve tested several others.

My main reasons for arpReach:

It’s up to date, professional, and under continuous development. Unlike some others who are resting on their laurels!

It’s a one-time purchase and as such it’s much, much cheaper than autoresponders with monthly subscriptions like aweber. (the same way InfiniteWP mentioned above is cheaper than a ManageWP subscription)

It has several advanced features. For example you can add tags to your contacts and have your autoresponder perform automatic actions on contacts with a specific tag.

There are literally hundreds of solutions available which will do this, some great, some not so great.

When I started selling digital products I used the most sophisticated system that was available. It had all the bells and whistles one could dream of. But it also had a learning curve that seemed harder than getting a PhD.

After some years I switched to DLGuard. Short for Download Guard.

Its set of features is limited, but it has everything you really need to sell digital products.

Sometimes less is more, and for me it was a huge simplification to switch from the monster sales system to one that does what’s needed: Collect the money and deliver the product.

8. Automate webinars for lead generation and sales with Evergreen Business System

Speaking of sales, the biggest current trend are webinars. You can use them to get leads [the people who sign up to see the webinar] and to generate sales [by promoting a product within the webinar].

Often webinars are held live for the audience of a specific affiliate partner.

Holding the same webinar again and again is very time consuming.

How about recording it once and then replaying the recording for all future webinar dates?

I’ve just bought a system that will automate the complete process from managing subscriptions, to playing the [pre-recorded] webinar again and again for months or years to come.

The screen shot shows a subscription form where the potential customer can chose a webinar date. The software will then subscribe him, send him email reminders, and play the webinar at the scheduled date.

I’ve not used it yet on a live site, but I created and tested one project. Evergreen Business System works flawlessly and is one of the most stunning marketing solutions I’ve ever tested.

The feature list is endless, and well thought out.

If you’re doing webinars for marketing and sales, take a look.

9. Automate posting of social media updates with SproutSocial and Triberr.

Some people detest automation of social media, but I find it crucial.

For your profile to succeed you need to post lots of useful content, so you need tools to create these posts fast, and to schedule the posts throughout the day.

My favorite tool for finding and posting content is SproutSocial.

SproutSocial’s features are superior to the more popular HootSuite. Unfortunately it’s also more expensive. They don’t even dare to disclose their current prices on the page falsely called pricing. Poor choice.

Whatever, SproutSocial’s ease of use is fantastic.

You can easily view, filter, and share streams with updates from your social media contacts. [Reading your stream in SproutSocial compares to HootSuite like Ferrari compares to horse-drawn carriage.]

SproutSocial also sports a super smart view and sharing of your favorite RSS feeds. This is where you find lots of share-worthy new content.

The screenshot shows the feed from one of my Twitter lists. You can switch lists or even profiles quickly with with the menus on the right.

My latest surprise discovery: Triberr

I’m not going into all benefits of Triberr, that’s beyond the topic of this post.

Regarding automated social media sharing on Triberr this is important:

You can build a stream that will show you new blog posts from ‘tribes’ you’ve joined. A tribe is a group of bloggers.

Once you’ve joined a few tribes your stream will show you dozens of new posts each day. You can semi-automatically share to multiple social networks with 1 click. Of course not all posts are share-worthy. But I find enough to fill my Twitter stream with great links.

You can also share manually one by one for full control over your shares.

You can collect lots of updates by clicking each of them once, and Triberr will schedule them automatically for distributed posting. For example 1 post every 90 minutes.

You can even decide to share your favorite bloggers fully automatic. This makes sense for those bloggers where you’re certain they post only great content.